In a video shown at a costly, two-day “global warming” jamboree at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hosted by Governor Schwarzenegger of California in November 2008, Barack Obama said:

“Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.”

Obama said he would introduce “a federal cap and trade system to reduce America’s emissions of carbon dioxide to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050.” He said his administration would “invest” $15 billion a year in solar power, wind power, biofuels, nuclear power and clean coal to “save the planet” by creating 5 million new “green jobs”.

In actual fact, figures from the Colorado Centre For Astrodynamics Research show that global sea levels, after having risen since 2000, have been falling significantly over the last 2 years.

“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”

According to an Associated Press report, The Farmers Almanac is now also predicting “below-average temperatures for most of the U.S.” The publication boasts of an 85 per cent accuracy rate for its forecasts which are given two years in advance.

According to a report from the World Meteorological Organization last month, the first half of 2008 was the coolest for at least five years, adding that it may actually be the coolest since 2000.

New South Wales Premier Rees says Tamworth was in drought but BoM maps say no drought near Tamworth

By Warwick Hughes November 29, 2008

Warwick Hughs

This is another of these fascinating cases where top Australian politicians seem unable to get the simple facts of rainfall correct. Is this more evidence of a national delusion where rainfall is concerned ?

Premier Nathan Rees is quoted in the ABC Online news story copied below that Tamworth had “..been drought-stricken for some time..”.

I have just downloaded a series of 7 BoM (Australian Bureau of Meteorology) drought maps for all periods, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 and 36 months, see below and there is no sign of drought near Tamworth for those periods.
It is telling that the article refers says, “While the rain has broken the drought, valuable crops have been destroyed, including one of the best winter grain crops in the region for years.” Nobody has the common sense to ask, how could such a good crop be grown in a drought ?

It may well be that the NSW Govt is still paying out drought relief to the Tamworth region years after any drought (maybe pre 36 months ago) has ended. I have been aware for years that the Govt pays out drought relief to areas where actual rain bears no resemblance to that indicated on BoM drought maps, see my 2005 article, “Are Martians growing Australian wheat ?”.

Weather experts should check rainfall figures before being quoted by the media

Warwick Hughs

By Warwick Hughes, November 29, 2008

We have all seen articles such as this from The Australian, “Southeast Queensland storms in line with climate change: weather experts”. The article is referring to storms of 18-20 November and the journalist seems intent on getting his headline despite one of the experts cautioning against reading too much into the storms by saying, “..that a series of events by themselves did not “prove” climate change one way or the other.” Full text copied below.

The real interest for me is not the ridiculous headline but the two experts quoted state that “..November in southeast Queensland had generally been a dry month over the past decade..”.

These experts are University of Southern Queensland professor of climate and water resources Roger Stone and Queensland weather bureau (BoM) spokesman Gavin Holcombe.

Now what are the facts about November rainfall in southeast Queensland over the past decade ? Lets look at November rainfall for central Brisbane and Gatton, home to the Professor’s University, taking November data for the 10 years 1998-2007 and comparing to long term averages for November. We find that for Brisbane and Gatton, the November average 1998-2007 is either very close to or exceeds the long term BoM mean(average). So we see that experts much quoted by the media are not fully in touch with simple realities of rainfall statistics, facts they could check in minutes. Is this more evidence of a national delusion about rainfall in Australia ?

Royal Navy logbooks dating to the 17th century might chart a new course from vague assumptions to verifiable reason in the stormy debate over global warming.

Mariners’ well-kept records detailing air pressure, wind speed and air and sea temperatures provide a snapshot of previous climate conditions. For a group of British academics and scientists examining historic climate changes, it’s a “treasure trove” of information, they say.

In a preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks, questions already are being raised that challenge the conclusions of global warming’s Chicken Littles. For instance, Europe in the 1730s experienced a period of rapid warming — not unlike that of recent years — which clearly wasn’t attributable to man-made influences.

In 2005, scientists linked Hurricane Vince, which developed in an area of low sea-surface temperatures, to climate change. Yet the old logbooks detail a similar hurricane in 1842 that followed the same trajectory. Mere coincidence?

What’s revealed is the complexity of climate science, says Dr. Dennis Wheeler, a University of Sunderland scientist, “and that it’s wrong to take particular events and link them to CO2 emissions.”

Are the ship logs conclusive? Perhaps no more so than the claims of global warming alarmists. But it’s data that should be carefully researched. Something we can’t say of the data deceptively manipulated to argue that the debate has ended regarding man’s role in planetary climate change.

We can only hope the most people in the US are shopping on Black Friday and not watching the Oprah Winfrey Show today. Al Gore has brought his global warming propaganda machine to share with Oprah. You can find the details on Oprah’s web page. Here are some of the topics that Gore is pushing:

Classic Gore:

“Some of the leading scientists are now saying we may have as little as 10 years before we cross a kind of point-of-no-return, beyond which it’s much more difficult to save the habitability of the planet in the future,” Gore says.

Yes, but Al you have been saying that for over ten years and we are still here. And in the last ten years the global temperatures stopped rising and are now in decline.

Click for a larger image

Really Al, show me where the temperatures are beyond natural fluctuations:

Gore agrees that the planet’s temperature has indeed experienced up and down cycles, but he says the current up cycle is too extreme. “It’s way off the charts compared to what those natural fluctuations are,” he says.

EUROPE is shivering through an extreme cold snap. One of the coldest winters in the US in more than 100 years is toppling meteorological records by the dozen, and the Arctic ice is expanding. Even Australia has been experiencing unseasonable snow.

But the stories about global warming have not stopped, not for a second.

In May last year, The Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reported that climate change had reduced the Southern Ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide, claiming that as a result global warming would accelerate even faster than previously thought.

The story was picked up and repeated in a number of different journals around the region.

But this week the CSIRO suggested the exact opposite. “The new study suggests that Southern Ocean currents, and therefore the Southern Ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide, have not changed in recent decades,” it said. This time the story got no coverage in the SMH, and was run on the ABC’s website as evidence the Southern Ocean was adapting to climate change.

CSIRO oceanographer Stuart Rintoul, a co-author of the study, said it did not disprove global warming and he did not believe its lack of an alarmist tone was responsible for the poor coverage.

But the story is being pointed out as an example of media bias on global warming. Critics argue that the ABC and the Fairfax media are the worst offenders.

ABC board member Keith Windschuttle said yesterday the national broadcaster was in breach of its charter to provide a diversity of views. “The ABC and the Fairfax press rarely provide an opportunity for global warming sceptics to put their view,” Mr Windschuttle said. “The science is not settled.

“We are seeing an increasing number of people with impeccable scientific backgrounds questioning part or whole of the story. I don’t believe the ABC has been reflecting the genuine diversity of the debate. Under its own act, the ABC is required to produce a diversity of views.”

Bob Carter of James Cook University, one of the world’s best-known climate change sceptics, said there was no doubt Windschuttle was correct.

“With very few exceptions, press reporters commenting on global warming are either ignorant of the science matters involved, or wilfully determined to propagate warming hysteria because that fits their personal world view, or are under editorial direction to focus the story around the alarmist headline grab — and often all three,” Professor Carter said.

National Climate Centre former head William Kininmonth said coverage of global warming had been hysterical and was getting worse, with a large public relations effort inundating the media with information from the alarmist side.

As the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, an economist, anti-totalitarian and climate change sceptic, prepares to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union next year, climate alarmists are doing their best to traduce him.The New York Times opened a profile of Klaus, 67, this week with a quote from a 1980s communist secret agent’s report, claiming he behaves like a “rejected genius”, and asserts there is “palpable fear” he will “embarrass” the EU.

But the real fear driving climate alarmists wild is that a more rational approach to the fundamentalist religion of global warming may be in the ascendancy – whether in the parliamentary offices of the world’s largest trading bloc or in the living rooms of Blacktown.

As the global financial crisis takes hold, perhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about climate.

One of Australia’s leading enviro-sceptics, the geologist and University of Adelaide professor Ian Plimer, 62, says he has noticed audiences becoming more receptive to his message that climate change has always occurred and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

In a speech at the American Club in Sydney on Monday night for Quadrant magazine, titled Human-Induced Climate Change – A Lot Of Hot Air, Plimer debunked climate-change myths.

“Climates always change,” he said. Our climate has changed in cycles over millions of years, as the orbit of the planet wobbles and our distance from the sun changes, for instance, or as the sun itself produces variable amounts of radiation. “All of this affects climate. It is impossible to stop climate change. Climates have always changed and they always will.”

HOW ENRON ORIGINATED THE EMISSIONS TRADING SCAM “Horner’s argument is that we are getting a one-sided discussion of climate change because most media outlets, politicians, activists and a substantial section of big business have – in a variety of ways – got an interest in keeping it that way. He tells me: ‘This affirms a worldview of many people: “Man is wretched, an agent of doom”; “There’s just about enough of [the moral people] and way too many of everyone else”; “Markets are horrible and the state needs to be much bigger”; “Development is terrible”. All of those movements find refuge in the global warming industry.’ – Review of Christopher Horner’s book “Red Hot Lies”. LINK